Lasso

Lasso

Description

Lasso is a heuristic for computing edge-weighted rooted (super)trees from partial distance data under the assumption that the distances satisfy the molecular clock assumption[1]. It is based on theoretical work carried out in [2] and [3]. Rather than estimating missing distance values using some imputting scheme it exploits redundancy in the distance matrix to reconstruct a unique (in a well-defined sense) tree. The found tree can then be either displayed on a computer screen or saved in a .tex file which allows inclusion in a latex document (see the manual). Alternatively the found tree can also be output in Newick format which allows reading it by other phylogenetic tree reconstruction tools such as PHYLIP. Also and depending on the amount of missing information, the returned tree is not guaranteed to contain all taxa. See for [4] details.